Legislation purporting to help child care centers by allowing collective bargaining is likely to have the opposite effect, taking money from centers while raising costs for parents, say Sen. Janéa Holmquist, R-Moses Lake and Sen. Curtis King, R-Yakima. They serve on the Senate Labor, Commerce and Consumer Protection Committee, which heard Senate Bill 5572 today.

If the goal is to increase public subsidies for child care centers and fund a child care wage ladder, you don’t need this bill to accomplish that,” said Holmquist, the committee’s ranking Republican member. “If Democrat supermajorities in the House and Senate all support this idea, what’s stopping them from increasing subsidies and funding the child care wage ladder?”

“This bill has an administrative cost to the taxpayers of nearly 1.5 million dollars per biennium,” Holmquist explained. “At a moment when we have a serious deficit, projected at 6 billion dollars and growing, we should not be wasting state resources on a heavy-handed and bureaucratic bill aimed at granting special favors to unions. I would much rather see these dollars go directly towards increasing childcare workers’ salaries.”

“With a few exceptions this is the same bill we saw a year ago, but the pitch for it has some new spin. Now I hear the terms ‘early learning’ and ‘teacher’ being used where it used to be ‘child care center’ and ‘worker,’” King said. “My concerns about this bill haven’t changed. It still has employers cover the workers’ union dues, still has directors and workers in the same bargaining unit, and it still sounds a lot like a path toward mandatory unionization.”

SB 5572 would affect owners and employees of licensed child care centers that have at least four slots filled by children covered by state child-care subsidies. It would consider those workers to be public employees and the governor as the public employer.

“I said it last year, and it’s still true: when has collective bargaining brought costs down?” King said. “I don’t see how this is going to be anything but a step backwards for parents and children over the long run.”

Employees can already unionize at individual child care centers, but this legislation gives the names and addresses of every child care center worker, manager or owner to any interested union.

“Ultimately, this bill is all about expanding union membership,” said Holmquist. “And that should never come at the expense of taxpayers, workers’ rights and, most importantly, the needs of low-income children.”